Atlus USA has released 40 minutes of Etrian Mystery Dungeon gameplay, which you can watch above. I recommend at least watching a few minutes of the video to see how adorable the art looks, how great the music is, and how fun the gameplay seems. I didn’t think much of this title until I got to have a look at how it plays. Let’s hope the final game lives up to this presentation.
However, if you don’t have the time, you can just read through our transcription of the most important bits. There’s quite a bit that was revealed in this playthrough that we haven’t known until now.
Without further ado …
3:00 Etrian Mystery Dungeon is tile-based and turn-based.
4:00 The Protector is a good class to lead the party because the class has Provoke, a skill that’s been in other Etrian games, which draws enemies’ attention towards the Protector and away from your other characters. They’re playing with the first four classes revealed for the game: the Protector, Landsknecht, Medic, and Runemaster.
5:00 The Protector and Landsknecht are equipment-based classes, and the Medic and Runemaster are skill-based classes. The Runemaster puts out the damage and the Medic is your healer. The Medic also gets rid of status effects, of which there are a lot in EMD. EMD is one of the more forgiving games in the Etrian series, says the player.
6:00 All the maps are randomly generated in the game. There are water tiles in the game, which most characters can’t use, but certain classes will be able to traverse.
7:00 The map on the bottom screen of the 3DS has a fog of war, so the world is only revealed as you reach it. Red icons on the bottom screen indicate enemies, orange icons indicate stairs, and Xs are traps. Traps can be revealed by attacking them or by using an item called Eyedrops. There are items that can be thrown and shot. There are also scrolls.
8:00 In all Mystery Dungeon games, the characters must eat food. Etrian Mystery Dungeon is no exception.
9:00 The Protector takes a lot less damage if it has equipment on, since it is an equipment-based class.
10:00 Party members can swap places in their layout.
11:00 The Runemaster has many ranged battle spells, including a Fireball rune and an Ice Lance rune. The Landsknecht has a Double Strike ability that lets him attack twice in a round.
12:00 Skills are handled similarly to how they are in the Etrian series. Each class has a Proficiency that takes only one skill point to fill up, which skill is usually super effective. The Proficiency skill of the Runemaster increases attack and defense for all allies in the room.
13:00 Other skills work as usual, that is, the player can invest multiple skill points in the skill. The Runemaster’s other skills include Fireball Rune, Ice Lance Rune, Lightning Rune, Runic Gleam (which buffs the three previous skills), TP Boost, and Herbology.
14:00 The Medic has the Healing, Refresh, Steady Hands, Heavy Strike, and Herbology skills, in addition to their own Proficiency. The Medic’s melee attack causes a status effect, as do most other classes’. The Protector’s Shield Smite is another example of a melee attack that causes a status effect, binding enemies’ arms.
15:00 The Protector’s skills are Proficiency, of course, and HP Up, the aforementioned Provoke and Shield Smite, Defense Boost, Refresh, and Mineralogy. Provoke also increases the Protector’s defenses so much that they only take very little damage from attacks. They’re also able to attack or move when they use Provoke, while a lot of other skill actions take up a whole turn.
16:00 In Etrian Mystery Dungeon, you always want to move downward, deeper into the dungeon.
17:00 Players can only use one character per turn, but can switch freely between characters during a turn until they settle on which one they want to use for that turn.
18:00 There are special amber tiles which, when walked over, heal TP and FP.
19:00 Another characteristic from Etrian games, gathering points, are in EMD. Unique drops are collected from these points, and every class specialises in gathering from specific kinds of gathering points. (The aforementioned Herbology and Mineralogy skills apply to these gathering points.)
20:00 Crane Ginseng was gathered from the gathering point. Other items like Scales, Grasseater Legs and Rat Fangs are collected from downed enemies.
21:00 Equipment takes up inventory slots. Players can also throw equipment, if they want, although this will destroy it.
22:00 Rats are “a-holes” and will run around the map throwing items they find on the map at you. It’s a good idea to disable them so that you get the item before they waste it. Blinking blue icons on the bottom screen’s map indicate a Wandering Box, which usuallys hold equipment or top-tier items in it. Wandering Boxes have a limited time frame in which you can get to them, so it’s important to be quick when they appear.
23:00 The map is always on the bottom screen of the 3DS.
24:00 Opening the Wandering Box got them a Knife +2. Pluses after an item name indicate that they’re better than normal. The game only has one difficulty option.
25:00 The map on the lower screen is pretty vital to understanding everything that’s going on in a room, because the top screen gives you a limited view. There is also a Watch command that lets the player scroll around the top screen.
26:00 There’s a creature called a Roller that, when it dies, rolls backwards and kills pretty much anything behind it. It’ll be important to be aware of where your characters are positioned when you’re fighting Rollers.
27:00 When enemies have a red icon above their head, they start doing “crazy amounts of damage”. Provoke wasn’t enough to distract the Roller from the Medic, so that character’s dead. There’s also a Rat that’s trying to get to a Wandering Box, whose items they can and will take to throw at the player, ruining the valuable finds.
29:00 There’s an item called Kasumi’s Lunch that heals your party. The Roller managed to kill another of the playtester’s characters. The playtester does QA for Atlus; that’s a pretty good indication of the game’s difficulty. Players can use an Ariadne Thread to teleport to the safety of town. In EMD, if players die in the dungeon, they lose all or most of their items—the player doesn’t seem clear on that point.
30:00 A bit of light banter. They’ve finally loosened up.
31:00 Players can pick up random items in the game world, too, like Confuse Scrolls.
32:00 Characters need food points to stay alive. The neat thing is that only the party member at the front of the line deteriorates FP in Etrian Mystery Dungeon, so if the lead starts to get hungry and you can’t do anything about it, you have the option to switch them out with another member, which will halt the original lead’s FP loss.
33:00 The Grasshopper has a Jump attack that does a lot of damage. They came upon another Roller, and one of the characters died again. Thankfully, they have an Yggdrasil Leaf, which resuscitated the fallen comrade.
34:00 The assisting Atlus guy is laughing his ass off at the player’s deaths. The player stresses that the Protector’s Provoke skill isn’t perfect and that mages should be kept out of melee range.
36:00 The Protector’s Provoke seems to even protect him against the Roller’s death tumble.
38:00 The Protector is the player’s favorite class because later on the game does “some unique things with positioning that really makes combat a lot more dynamic”, and the Protector gets to take advantage of that. Enemies can be vulnerable to physical or magical attacks, so it’s important to have a diverse party to take advantage of those weaknesses, which is why the player likes the Runemaster, too.
39:00 If an enemy is behind the Roller when it dies, the enemy will die.
40:00 Other items in the game include Light Scrolls, Whirl Scrolls, and Sleeping Pills. The Confuse scroll causes those affected to attack in random directions, which means they will usually miss. Scrolls affect the entire room, which makes them pretty powerful items to have in your arsenal.
41:00 The AI seems pretty clever, taking advantage of the aforementioned weaknesses of enemies when playing your characters.
That’s that. That was a pretty fun stream when they finally loosened up, eh?
